Seven new, original newspaper stories that add detail to the stories from earlier today (updated originally to add the one from the "Guardian"; updated further on Saturday to add the ones from the "Washington Post" and the "Los Angeles Times"; updated still further early Sunday to add the one from the "Financial Times"):
From the UK's "Independent"...
At least 20 Sudanese refugees and asylum-seekers, including three children, have been killed and dozens injured after authorities cleared a protest camp in the Egyptian capital, Cairo.
Security police used water cannons and beat squatters with heavy batons after about 2,500 Sudanese refused to leave the city park they have been occupying for the past three months in protest at their treatment by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).
One Sudanese refugee told The Independent that police also used tear gas during the clashes.
According to Sudanese witnesses, up to 4,500 central security police surrounded the small park late on Thursday night. After negotiations failed, the police turned water cannons on to the men, woman and children who had been living in squalid conditions inside in the camp since September. Shortly before dawn, police used tear gas before charging the camp, destroying tents and beating the protesters in an attack which lasted half an hour.
"People were crying and screaming, children were running, old people were falling to the ground," said Hussein Sheikh Eddin, 30, a refugee from Sudan's Darfur region who lived in the camp. "It was very, very strong violence by the police. The Sudanese put up no defence."
Mr Eddin said he saw women and children being beaten. He believed that "between 10 and 30" Sudanese, including children, had been killed.
The Egyptian government had earlier placed the number of dead at 10 and claimed that the Sudanese deaths were caused by a stampede.
The forced clearance was the final act of a long-running saga that has tested the patience of the Egyptian government and strained relations with the UNHCR. The Sudanese, who had fled from the south of the country and from the province of Darfur, set up the camp near the offices of the UNHCR after efforts to resettle them to other countries had stalled.
The situation reached a stalemate last month when it became apparent that no country was prepared to accept the Sudanese, many of whom had been granted refugee status. The UNHCR had earlier announced that it would no longer provide aid to those who had applied for but been refused refugee status.
UNHCR high commissioner Antonio Guterres said he was "deeply shocked and saddened" by the attack. "There is no justification for such violence and loss of life. This is a terrible tragedy and our condolences go to all the families of those who died and to the injured," he said.
A spokesman for Egypt's Interior Ministry said it had attempted to negotiate the peaceful removal of the Sudanese, but that they had not responded. "They had no legal right to stay in the park. They threw jars of water and wine over Egyptian police," he said.
The camp had become a blot on the neighbourhood of Mohandiseen, which is home to a number of diplomatic missions and Cairo's upper middle classes.
The refugees lived crammed together with no clean water and no lavatory facilities. By night they huddled under plastic sheeting, with suitcases marking their family groupings.
Sanitary conditions had deteriorated, with local residents complaining that the Sudanese were defecating and urinating in the streets. Since the camp was set up three people, including a child, have died.
As the Egyptians began to clear up the park, Mr Eddin said: "I am very, very afraid. I have nowhere to stay. I am afraid of what will happen to us now."
However, there was no sympathy from local residents. "They've all got Aids, they're filthy, they stink," Samir Mohammed said. "They should go back where they came from."
Egyptian riot police rushed into a crowd of unarmed Sudanese migrants early this morning [Friday], killing at least 23 people, including small children, after the group refused to leave a public park it had occupied for three months hoping to pressure United Nations officials to relocate them.
The police tried for hours to persuade thousands of men, women and children to leave the small square, hosing them with water canon, surrounding them with cordons of riot police, imploring the women and children to board buses, and repeatedly warning that they would be removed forcefully.
But the crowd was desperate, having moved with all their possessions, suitcases loaded with clothing and family photographs, jewelry and kitchen wares, into what amounted to a traffic island in a middle-class neighborhood. They hoped the authorities would declare them refugees and send them abroad. They had fled war-torn Sudan, but the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office in Cairo - across from where they camped out - told them that they were not eligible for refugee status or for relocation because it was safe for them to return home.
When the police charged, women and children tried to huddle together, and to hide under blankets as some men grabbed for anything - tree limbs, metal bars - struggling to fight back, witnesses said. The police hesitated, then rushed in with full force, trampling over people and dragging the Sudanese off to waiting buses, the witnesses said. Some people were trampled.
"They started hitting our heads with the sticks and dragging us," said Napoleon Robert Lado, a leader of the group, speaking on a cell phone from a police camp where he and others had been taken. "They dragged me when I was trying to help a woman who fainted to stand up. They dragged me and I was stepping over the old people and women and children. I was screaming and trying to step away, but could not."
By nightfall, Muhammad Khalaf, head of the area's emergency department, said there were 23 dead, 7 of them children, 8 elderly, and 7 more women. Human rights organizations said that others died after being taken to police camps and being denied immediate access to health care.
For Egypt, it was more bad news after a string of incidents that have attracted widespread condemnation of the government. Last week, a court sentenced a political opposition leader, Ayman Nour, to five years of hard labor after finding him guilty of forging petitions to create his political party - charges that were so widely viewed as politically motivated there was a strong rebuke from Washington and the European Union. Before that, state security forces killed more than a dozen people while trying to stop voters from casting ballots for opposition candidates during parliamentary elections.
UNHCR officials had washed their hands of the Sudanese refugees after the group balked at a deal that would have had them leave the park in return for help finding new homes in Egypt and for having all of their cases reviewed. The refugees refused. They wanted to leave, period. And so the matter was turned over to Egyptian authorities, which decided to turn it over to the security forces.
"This was an occupation we had to end," said a colonel who helped supervise the raid but asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to make any statements. "For five hours, we had been trying to negotiate with them to convince them to move to another place until the issue is solved, but they declined."
Most everyone involved with the crisis seemed shocked by the brutal outcome, even Egyptian officials, who by the standards of a country that barely tolerates public dissent felt they had bent over backwards to try to cajole the Sudanese into leaving the square. The authorities said they were not to blame for the outcome. UNHCR said it was not to blame for the outcome. They both laid the blame on the Sudanese for being stubborn, a charge many of the Sudanese accepted, saying who would not risk death for a chance at a better life.
"The only thing I can say is that the Egyptian authorities have been tolerating the sit-in strike for the past three months because, just like us, they wanted a peaceful solution," said Astrid Van Genderen Stort, a UNHCR spokeswoman in Cairo. "But at a certain point the situation became an issue of public disorder. There were serious health threats."
The warnings began around 9 p.m., when the police surrounded the camp, hundreds, perhaps thousands, dressed in black uniforms with helmets, and plastic shields and truncheons. They shouted through bullhorns, telling the protesters to climb aboard 16 buses. They refused, even as the police began to march in place, pounding their boots into the ground. By 3:30 a.m., the police opened fire with water [cannons], soaking the people, who huddled in the cold night between blankets and plastic tarps, anything they could find. They began to pray, and hold hands, and scream as the police rushed in.
"I was very scared," said Michael Edward, 32, also from a cell phone after being taken by the police. "I was screaming and looking for my wife. It is unfortunate that they attacked people and beat us brutally. What kind of crime did we commit? Who treats refugees like that?"
The showdown began in late September, when migrants, most from the southern part of the country, began to show up in the middle of one of Cairo's more upscale neighborhoods. Surrounded by banks, fast food shops and car dealerships, they kept arriving and soon created a small village. An estimated 3,000 people crowded into a space no larger than a basketball court. The neighbors complained bitterly as the stench of human existence began to permeate the area, and as people washed in the bathroom of a nearby mosque. Many of the people in the camp seemed sick, and over the days and months they were there, several died.
UNHCR tried to negotiate and recently reached a deal with people who were identified as leaders - but the group refused, because the deal did not call for relocation, and that was all they wanted. Life in Egypt, they said, was too hard, and returning to Sudan, out of the question. But the UNHCR said, simply, that's not how it works.
"The UNHCR has always appealed for peaceful means to end this situation but we have to remember that for the past three months, we have exhausted all efforts to find a peaceful solution to this problem," said Ms. Van Genderen Stort, the UNHCR spokeswoman. "We met so many times with the demonstrators, we discussed their demands, we offered what we could offer and we explained what we couldn't do. There was a lot of support from the Egyptian authorities."
Human rights groups, and the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood issued statements condemning the violence and the authorities for giving up on the people in the square, and sending the police in.
After being loaded onto the buses, the Sudanese were taken to three separate police camps, where their names were taken and by late Friday some said they were being released with no possessions and nowhere to go.
The square where they had lived for three months was awash in the debris of many lives. The ground was covered with wet socks, a large plastic bag of sugar, a spoon, a shoe, a wool sweater, a stripped tie, empty juice boxes, cooking margarine, an old pot cover, an empty baby bottle, an old Sudanese school ID belonging to Tout Denek from Khartoum, family pictures of a young Sudanese girl, maybe five, blowing out the candles on her birthday cake. Everything was being sprayed in disinfectant by state health workers, and then loaded by sanitation workers into hauling containers. Health workers said they found bags and bottles of human waste in the camp.
Some of the neighbors were happy to see the Sudanese gone.
"I swear to God you are heroes," a woman shouted to the police as she drove by in her car.
Egyptian authorities were accused yesterday [Friday] of a "savage massacre" after an overnight raid to clear Sudanese demonstrators from a camp in Cairo left at least 20 dead and scores wounded.
The victims included children and the elderly. They were killed in the early hours of yesterday as thousands of police officers dragged away hundreds of migrants from the makeshift camp where they had lived since September.
The Egyptian interior ministry said the dead were killed in a stampede after failing to heed police orders and that 23 officers were wounded in clashes with the protesters.
But witnesses said there was no stampede and that police severely beat the Sudanese migrants as they were forced on to waiting buses.
The migrants had been camping outside offices of the United Nations on a main Cairo street.
"The savage way the security forces intervened led to a real human massacre," the South Centre, an independent Sudanese human rights monitoring group, said.
It said nearly 1,300 Sudanese men, women and children were forcibly taken to sites outside Cairo.
The migrants began their protest at the end of September after the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) refused to grant them official refugee status. While violence in Sudan's western Darfur region has left tens of thousands dead, a peace deal was signed to end the country's two-decade civil war almost a year ago. The UN in Cairo says the deal means that most of those at the ramshackle camp are economic migrants rather than genuine asylum seekers.
But the protesters say it is not safe for them to return to Sudan and demand to be designated refugees and resettled in a third country where they would have better conditions than in Egypt.
Shortly after midnight yesterday police surrounded the camp and alternated negotiations with blasts from water cannon. Some protesters knelt in prayer as they were doused. At around 5am the police used truncheons to remove those who would not go willingly. Witnesses said police beat protesters as they were carried away.
In Geneva, Antonio Guterres, the UNHCR chief, said he was "deeply shocked and saddened by the events".
At least 20 Sudanese migrants died when thousands of Egyptian riot police brutally evicted them from their protest camp in an affluent district of Cairo yesterday [Friday].
An estimated 2,000 Sudanese people had been camped for three months in Mustafa Mahmoud square, Mohandiseen - an upper middle class suburb where the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has an office - protesting about conditions in Egypt and seeking to be resettled in another country.
The attack began shortly before dawn when riot police fired water [cannons] at the group. The authorities then negotiated with the protest leaders in between bursts of water [cannons]. At about 5am police swarmed into the camp from all directions.
A reporter for the Associated Press who witnessed police attacking the refugees with truncheons said that in many cases they continued to beat the protesters even as they were being dragged away.
The reporter also saw two adults and a young girl, apparently three or four years old, being carried away unconscious. A medical worker in an ambulance said the girl was dead.
One protester being dragged away by two policemen was clubbed with a tree branch about the size of a man's arm by a third officer.
Egypt's interior ministry blamed the violence on the protesters. "Attempts were made to persuade them to disperse, but to no avail," the ministry said in a statement. "The migrants' leaders resorted to incitement and attacks against the police."
Officials said 20 protesters died and a ministry statement said 50 more were injured, "mostly elderly and children". The statement said 75 police were also injured. According to the ministry, the casualties among protesters resulted from a stampede. The AP reporter saw no stampede but said the protesters could not flee because the camp was completely encircled by police.
"Protesters could be seen fighting back with long sticks that appeared to be supports for makeshift tents," the reporter wrote.
Officials at the South Centre, a Sudanese human rights monitoring group, said 1,280 protesters were put into buses and taken to three camps outside Cairo.
The migrants were thought to be a mixture of Muslims, Christians and animists, from various parts of Sudan. They are believed to have included recognised refugees, asylum seekers and possibly some economic migrants.
"We're very shocked and saddened by what's transpired," said a UNHCR spokeswoman in Geneva.
The protesters had been seeking resettlement in a third country "but that is not really in UNHCR's gift - it's dependent on a third country agreeing to take them", she said. "We tried to maintain a dialogue with the protesters and there were several mediation attempts.
"What they seem to be saying is that conditions for them are tough in Egypt, but they are not in danger of being sent back [to Sudan]. They can work in Egypt and have education."
Between two and five million Sudanese people are thought to have fled to Egypt - only to face racism in a country already suffering from poverty, high unemployment and inadequate social services. Photographs of Sudanese refugees who had allegedly disappeared or been killed in Egypt were displayed around the Cairo camp.
Three years ago Egyptian police rounded up hundreds of Africans in what, according to Human Rights Watch, was referred to on a police document as "Operation Track Down Blacks".
A three-month standoff between Sudanese refugees and Egyptian authorities climaxed in bloodshed early Friday when club-wielding police invaded a refugee squatter camp, setting off a melee in which at least 20 and perhaps 26 Sudanese were killed.
Some refugees fought back, using tent poles as weapons. An Egyptian Interior Ministry statement, which acknowledged 12 deaths, said 74 police officers were wounded. Officials blamed the deaths on a stampede.
The refugees set up the camp in a park in September to press their demands for resettlement in a Western country. They refused to return to their unstable homeland despite a January peace deal that ended years of north-south civil war.
After the peace agreement, the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees stopped registering Sudanese for political asylum. Protesters resisted police orders and appeals from the Sudanese Embassy to leave.
At about 1 a.m. Friday, about 3,000 helmeted riot police surrounded the park, which is located in the relatively affluent Mohandessin district on the west side of the Nile River. They fired water cannons at some of the 2,000 refugees gathered there. After trying to drag people one by one onto buses for about two hours, the police invaded.
As is common with riot police in Egypt, the stiff rows of officers soon turned into a throbbing mob of uncontrolled baton-swingers. Police pursued refugees to the buses and whacked them as they boarded, including women and children.
Boutrous Deng, a Sudanese protest leader, told the Associated Press that 26 Sudanese were killed -- 17 men, 2 women and 7 children. Hospital officials earlier put the figure at 23, according to the Reuters news agency. Security officials cited anonymously by the AP said there were 20 deaths.
By dawn, the park was cleared, and about 1,000 refugees were transported to police barracks outside the city limits, Interior Ministry officials said. Other Sudanese huddled in parks and on street corners elsewhere in the sprawling capital. Piles of luggage and clothing remained where the protest camp had stood.
Tension over refugee arrivals from the south is felt across North Africa. Sub-Saharan Africans, fleeing violence and hunger in their homelands, have flocked to countries along Africa's Mediterranean coast. Many then board boats to try to reach Spain or Italy.
The European Union has pressured North African governments to curb the migrant traffic to its shores. Compliance commonly ends in brutality. In Libya, which until recently permitted sub-Saharan Africans to enter without a visa, reports of refugees disappearing without a trace after arrest are common.
On Thursday, seven migrants fled Morocco by clambering over a razor-wire fence into Spain's North African enclave of Melilla. In September and October, hundreds of African migrants stormed Melilla and Ceuta, another Spanish possession in North Africa. In separate incidents, Moroccan and Spanish police shot at the crowds, killing 11.
The exact number of Sudanese in Egypt is not known, but estimates range from 200,000 to 2 million.
Egypt's Interior Ministry said police were responding to the needs of the UNHCR, which, according to a ministry statement, had received "threats to attack the commission offices and its members." The ministry also asserted that the refugees ignored a Sudanese Embassy deadline for them to abandon the park or face the consequences.
"Attempts had been made to convince them to disperse, but to no avail," the ministry statement said. "The Egyptian security forces were implementing the deadline imposed by the Sudanese Embassy. The migrants' leaders resorted to incitement and attacks against the police."
The UNHCR reported last week that it had reached a compromise with some protest leaders. The agency pledged to resume hearing some asylum cases and offered a one-time payment of up to $700 for housing expenses.
In Geneva, UNHCR chief Antonio Guterres said in a statement: "I am deeply shocked and saddened by the tragic events early today in Cairo. There is no justification for such violence and loss of life."
The Sudanese government expressed understanding of the police action, with a spokesman saying the Egyptian government "was within its rights to reestablish its control."
From the "Los Angeles Times"...
Egyptian riot police armed with clubs and water cannons stormed a downtown square packed with Sudanese refugees before dawn Friday in an attack that a human rights group said left 23 people dead.
About 2,000 Sudanese had been living for months in a dilapidated tent city near the offices of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, demanding to be resettled abroad. Their encampment was viewed by many residents as an eyesore in one of Cairo's upscale districts.
Thousands of Egyptian riot police massed around the square early Friday and tried to force the demonstrators onto waiting buses. When they refused to leave, police fired water cannons and beat them with clubs. The clashes dragged on for hours; television footage showed the Sudanese fighting back with tent poles and bottles.
Witnesses said at least one child, a young girl, was among the dead.
"They didn't have to go that far," said Fathy Zayed, 50, an Egyptian who said police beat the protesters mercilessly. "There were women and children there."
The Egyptian Interior Ministry put the death toll at 10, but the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights said it counted 23 fatalities. In a six-page statement, the ministry said the deaths and injuries were caused by a stampede.
The confrontation "came after the UNHCR office in Cairo received warnings of possible assault on its headquarters and staff, which in turn asked the security to protect them and disperse the sit-in," the statement said.
A UNHCR spokeswoman told Reuters news agency that the organization had no warning that the police would raid the tent city Friday morning.
The United Nations agency said in a statement that it had tried to resolve the dispute since the protest began in September. "Throughout this period, UNHCR maintained a constant dialogue and several mediation efforts, always emphasizing that such situations needed to be resolved peacefully," it said.
"There is no justification for such violence and loss of life," High Commissioner Antonio Guterres said in the statement.
Once the violence subsided, the surviving protesters were put on buses and driven to military camps around Cairo, where their refugee status will be determined, officers at the scene said.
All that remained at the square as evidence of their sit-in were heaps of blankets, still damp from the blasts of water. Family photos were strewn among children's sandals and empty milk tins. Scattered English-language tutorial kits spoke of their hopes for better lives.
"There were a lot of dead bodies," said an ambulance driver from a nearby hospital, called by police to remove the bodies. "I know they said there were 10, but there were a lot." The ambulance driver declined to give his name.
At Embaba General Hospital, where some bodies were taken, workers with a humanitarian agency tried to get more details on the status of the injured and demanded information on the whereabouts of the dead protesters' remains. They could confirm only that three bodies were at Embaba. They had already been denied access to three hospitals around Cairo, they said.
Sudanese asylum seekers have trickled into neighboring Egypt for years to escape civil war. Upon arrival, they are expected to register with the UNHCR to be recognized as asylum seekers and receive an interview date for determining refugee status.
But the UNHCR stopped hearing the cases after a peace deal ending Sudan's civil war was signed in January.
It was this legal limbo, along with the lack of medical care, work permits and education they faced in Egypt, that drove the Sudanese to begin the protest. Crammed together in the tight space, they had only blankets to protect them from the winter chill. They survived by picking up jobs where they could. Many of the men worked in construction.
As the months passed, many residents and shopkeepers in the area grew resentful of their presence. Witnesses said that Egyptians looked on in approval Friday as police beat the Sudanese.
"They have been in this square for months, drinking alcohol and conducting their marital relations for all to see," said Hassan Ahmed, 43, a shopkeeper.
"They were drinking alcohol, getting drunk, and all this in front of the mosque," Noha Mohammed, a 20-year-old student, said as she came out of a restaurant near the square. "I don't understand the problem. Why don't they just go back to Sudan?"
Barbara Harrell-Bond, chairwoman of the Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance project and professor of forced-migration studies at the American University in Cairo, argued that the standoff could have been avoided.
"UNHCR's first words to us were, 'These people are of no concern to us,' " Harrell-Bond said. "If UNHCR hadn't come out with such provocative statements, heels wouldn't have been dug [in] so far."
But Harrell-Bond, who works closely with the Sudanese refugees, said she had advised them against their protest.
"The bottom line is all of them want to be resettled and sent out of Egypt, and they have good reasons," she said. But she said they should have drawn attention to the discrimination they faced and tried to gain access to services.
The UNHCR's efforts to resolve the situation "simply came too late," she said.
At least 20 Sudanese refugees were killed and 50 injured yesterday [Friday] as Egyptian police forced an end to a three-month sit-in outside the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' Cairo office.
Since late September, 2,000 refugees from southern Sudan and the western province of Darfur had been camped in squalid conditions outside UNHCR offices in an affluent Cairo neighbourhood. They were demanding full refugee status and relocation from Egypt, where they complain of poor treatment and racial discrimination.
Witnesses said police, after attempting negotiations, sprayed the protesters with water [cannons] before moving in with truncheons to force them on to buses.
One witness who followed the buses after watching events from a nearby building, said some of the refugees had been taken to a state security camp in the desert outside Cairo. "We could hear children screaming, and we saw women being dragged along the ground by their hair, and men being beaten all the way on to the buses," she said.
Egyptian human rights activists were planning a demonstration at the same spot today.
The refugees' protest has highlighted the plight of an estimated 2 [million]-3 [million] Sudanese living in Egypt. Those among them who are registered with the UNHCR are entitled to basic healthcare and protection, and in theory are able to work. But Egypt struggles to tackle its own social problems, and many Sudanese who arrive from neighbouring Sudan dream of moving on.
Egyptian authorities blamed the protesters for attacking police with bottles and sticks.
In a statement, the Interior Ministry said 20 Sudanese were killed and 75 policemen injured in the ensuing clash.
Several witnesses said children were among the dead.
Astrid Van Genderen Stort of the UNHCR in Cairo said the agency had not been informed of police plans and said it had urged the authorities to use peaceful means should they choose to end the protest.
She said the UNHCR continued to register refugees from southern Sudan on a collective basis, giving them access to six-month renewable visas.
However, it had stopped "individual status determination" for southern Sudanese since a peace agreement last year between the Khartoum government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army of Southern Sudan offered hope of an end to 21 years of civil war.
She said those among the protesters from Darfur, where conflict is still raging, were more likely to fulfil criteria for resettlement. But the UNHCR had broken off negotiations to end the sit-in last week after leaders had insisted on relocation for the whole group.
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